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Universal/accessible design of the home from an occupational therapy and a construction perspective. This blog is part of a quest for cool, convenient, functional design that makes life safer, easier, and as maintenance-free as possible. It's about the lifestyle.

Functional Homes has been designing, remodeling, and building homes for accessibility since 2006, our online store, Essential Luxuries, was born on June 12, 2014. We search the world to fine high quality, cool products that make life easier, more fun, and that promote independence.

Any ideas or suggestions are welcome, we are now online and at your service. Let the fun begin.:-)

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

We need to change our bedroom flooring. I use an electric wheelchair and we have a heavy bed on wheels. My chair creates a path in our present carpet and when we move our bed, it pulls and stretches the carpet. We've considered every type of flooring from epoxy to DIY oak plywood, carpet tiles, wood look porcelain tiles and commercial grade carpet. Cost and ease of installation are important factors to consider. What can you recommend?

If you're looking for carpet FLOR carpet tiles are a great product from what I understand although I haven't had any projects where we've used them.

I like the altro and shannon vinyl for good looking flooring that wears well. For carpet, low pile carpet (1/4" nap is best) with no carpet pad is what I used to always recommend and install. Recently I discovered TRED_MOR carpet pads. TRED-MOR is a dense carpet pad that has adhesive on both sides so the carpet doesn't pull or shift.

For flooring I always use professional installers. Flooring is very difficult to install correctly and it's more expensive to deal with mistakes or a shortened life of the flooring then to have it installed correctly in my opinion. When I first started out I had some flooring go bad and will never allow anyone but a professional install flooring now. Builders are good at building not installing flooring in my experience.